Wednesday, December 31, 2008

5. Superman: The Music (Film Score Monthly)This staggering eight-disc set compiles the scores from all four Christopher Reeve Superman movies and contains a beautifully designed mini-book filled with exhaustive liner notes. The expanded discs of the Ken Thorne scores from Supermans II and III were probably the main reason why Superman completists dove into savings that they otherwise reserve for their mortgage payments for their Luthor-owned condos in order to pay for this pricey set ($120!). I never liked Thorne's scores (the orchestra budget in II and III was clearly slashed, so Thorne's rearrangements of John Williams' music sounded tinny and undernourished). For me, the real previously unreleased gem of the set was the disc containing Ron Jones' energetic and underrated music from Ruby-Spears' decent '80s Superman animated series. Jones' Superman cues sound like the cues he later wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Best of Both Worlds" two-parter, which TNG showrunner Rick Berman reportedly disliked because he preferred the music on his show to sound boring.

4. They Live: 20th Anniversary Edition (AHI)Obey. Consume. This expanded release of the bluesy score from John Carpenter's sharpest and cleverest post-Thing flick is your God.

3. Blazing Saddles (La-La Land)The only previous times any of the music from Blazing Saddles was made available were when Elektra/Asylum included three songs from Saddles on the 1978 High Anxiety soundtrack LP and when "I'm Tired" made its CD debut on Rhino's 1998 Warner Bros.: 75 Years of Film Music box set. The release of the cues from John Morris' short but fantastic score to the Mel Brooks classic--another one of my favorite movies--was long overdue. All the major cues are on there, including the Count Basie Orchestra's performance of "April in Paris," which is to black cowboy music what Jay-Z's "Roc Boys (and the Winner Is)..." is to black superhero music.

2. Shaft Anthology: His Big Score and More! (Film Score Monthly)FSM's Shaft set marked a couple of milestones: the first-ever release of the film versions of Isaac Hayes and J.J. Johnson's score cues from the first Shaft installment (the 1971 Enterprise/Stax soundtrack album was a re-recording) and the CD debut of Gordon Parks' Shaft's Big Score soundtrack. Though the release was actually sent to the pressing plant for manufacturing three weeks before Hayes' death, it ended up being the illest way to honor his memory.

1. Batman: The Animated Series (La-La Land)Unlike previous superhero cartoon shows, B:TAS didn't recycle the same four or five score cues or repurpose creaky old library music. Shirley Walker, one of the few female composers in the business, and her B:TAS team composed an original score for every episode. Their use of a full orchestra made other animated action shows look like that pathetic El Mariachi musician character who prefers a synthesizer over bandmates. Sadly, Walker didn't live to see the release of her lovingly crafted music from B:TAS (before her death in 2006, only her score from the Mask of the Phantasm spinoff movie was released). She would have been thrilled about La-La Land's two-disc set, which is dedicated to her and compiles scores from 10 B:TAS eps, including Harley Quinn's debut ep, "Joker's Favor" (pictured above). I've been a fan of B:TAS since its 1992 premiere, so I've waited 16 years for a release like this. I never said thank you, La-La Land. And then La-La Land will probably say the following in that Batrasp that sounds like a cross between a whitened-up Keak da Sneak and a Muppet: "And you'll never have to."

13. The island is visited by the freighties, who include Daniel, a heroic science nerd, and Miles, a wiseass "ghostbuster" and the most interesting and least clichéd Asian American male character to hit network TV in years (Lost).

12. Patterson punches Encino Man (Generation Kill).

11. "Hey John, I got a question! You need a ride to the airport?" (Late Show with David Letterman).

Sunday, December 28, 2008

The 100th and final Fistful of Soundtracks episode in the current format is a d00Zy: all 22 official 007 opening title themes in chronological order, from the Dr. No instrumental theme to Quantum of Solace's "Another Way to Die."

Quick--what's the only 007 main title theme in which the singer almost fainted in the recording booth after hitting a high note at the end of the theme? The answer's in the photo.

"Dance Into the Fire"--a special extra-length episode--begins streaming late Monday night at midnight and repeats Tuesday and Thursday at 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm, Wednesday at midnight, and Saturday and Sunday at 7am, 9am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm.

Sheldon also forgot about Adrienne Barbeau (the voice of Catwoman on Batman: The Animated Series) and Gina Gershon (she assumed the role in 2004 on the imaginatively titled animated series The Batman). Sheldon's third favorite Catwoman, legendary "Santa Baby" singer Eartha Kitt, has died at 81 from colon cancer on the holiday that was the subject of her signature song.

Kitt was the purrrrrfect replacement for Julie Newmar when the statuesque dancer/actress was unable to continue playing Batman's most formidable female foe on the '60s series because she was busy filming MacKenna's Gold. No other Catwoman could purrrrr or grrrrrowl like Kitt did. How fitting that the role was assumed by someone named Kitt.

Who can forget when Kitt purred one of the greatest lines in an Eddie Murphy movie that weren't spoken by Murphy ("Marcus, darling... I don't have any panties on...")?

Kitt led an amazing life. She was a civil rights activist who was blacklisted for criticizing the Vietnam War and its negative effect on minorities and more recently, she expressed her joy over Senator Obama's rise as a presidential candidate ("It's one of the most wonderful things that can happen to this country") and supported her countless gay fans on the issue of same-sex marriage.

She goes on to say that the gay marriage issue is similar to what African-Americans experienced during the time of the Civil-Rights Movement. "We were not allowed to go through certain doors because of our race, our color," she says intensely. "It was so stupid that we were not able to sit at the counter of a restaurant because it was only for Anglo-Saxons. It's stupid when this country says it was born on "freedom for all," but it's "freedom for some"!

This Christmas is a bittersweet one due to the news of her passing on the day when she suggestively invited Kringle to "come and trim my Christmas tree." I usually get creeped out by songs that try to sex up Santa like he's the hero of a Judd Apatow movie, but Kitt's rendition of the frequently covered "Santa Baby" is awesome. Her version was the first version and it's still the sultriest.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

For me, Christmas ain't Christmas without three things: 1) Paul Shaffer doing his hysterical impression of Cher singing "O Holy Night," 2) Jay Thomas telling an anecdote about an encounter with Lone Ranger star Clayton Moore, followed by Thomas trying to knock a giant meatball off the top of a Christmas tree with a football, and 3) Darlene Love performing "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)."

One of the suckiest things about the writer's strike was that it led to Late Show with David Letterman not being able to do its annual Christmas edition last year. Tonight, Cher and her muff, Thomas and Love are back.

Before he played Carlton, Alfonso Ribeiro was best known for his slick dance moves on Broadway and in commercials with Michael Jackson back when he was black, so it's funny that Ribeiro's most famous dance move today is a much less slick-looking move in which he had to pretend to be a less skilled dancer. The Carlton Dance is a parody of what has to be the whitest-looking dance ever. Every rhythmically challenged white person in the '80s did it, from Bruce Springsteen and Courteney Cox in the "Dancing in the Dark" video to the clubgoers at the Tech Noir in the original Terminator.

Whenever Ribeiro would bust out the Carlton Dance, everyone in the studio audience would lose their minds. Twelve years after the last time Carlton shook his ass back and forth to Tom Jones' "It's Not Unusual" on NBC, that dorky dance still makes crowds lose their minds, judging from yesterday's reactions from the Raider Nation, the TV sports reporters and the blogosphere.

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* When Higgins scored another TD, he bust out what SacBee blogger Jason Jones (not the soon-to-be-ex-Daily Show correspondent) called "one of Big Daddy Kane's patented dance moves." After the game, JLH identified this second dance as the "Hooka Hooka." He also did the Humpty Dance for a TV sports reporter in the locker room. The guy's got quite an arsenal of end-zone dances. A hater said on a message board that JLH's "idiotic dances need to be penalized." Looks like Reverend Shaw wants to expand his anti-dancing crusade from Bomont to the NFL.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

This week, I'm streaming the 2005 Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode "Yule Log" (WEB71), which consists of music from holiday-related movies and Christmas TV specials.

This is a reedited version of "Yule Log." I removed from the episode a Crash score cue by Mark Isham and a Family Stone score cue by Michael Giacchino and replaced them with Shirley Walker's cues from Batman: The Animated Series' "Christmas with the Joker" episode. The "Christmas with the Joker" tracks are part of La-La Land Records' new two-CD B:TAS set, the perfect Christmas present for anyone who's a B:TAS fan.

Ep WEB71 airs Monday and Wednesday at midnight, Tuesday and Christmas Day Thursday at 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm, and Saturday and Sunday at 7am, 9am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

As a fan of Batman: The Animated Series, I've waited 15 years for the score cues from the groundbreaking show to be released on an album. Now the wait is finally over, thanks to La-La Land Records' Batman: The Animated Series score compilation, which the label released as a limited edition two-CD set on Tuesday (a week after Warner Bros. Records double-dipped the Dark Knight soundtrack with additional score cues). I'll be adding some of the music from La-La Land's release to rotation on A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" block.

Modeled in tone after Tim Burton's somber-looking, dark-humored Batman films but much more faithful to the comics, Bruce Timm's B:TAS was the first American superhero cartoon show that felt cinematic. B:TAS writer/producer Paul Dini, who scripted the landmark, Emmy-winning Mr. Freeze revamp"Heart of Ice," says in the soundtrack liner notes that the show's crew constructed each episode like a mini-movie.

The B:TAS crew must have heard Peter Bogdanovich's anecdotes about how Samuel Fuller mentored him during the making of the low-budget 1968 thriller Targets ("Never think about limitations! Only think about what you want!") because like Fuller, they clearly didn't let a TV budget stop them from doing what they wanted. They brought a cinematic approach to everything, from the way they paced the dialogue--B:TAS' minimal and terse dialogue was different from other superhero cartoons, especially the '90s Marvel shows, like Saban's X-Men and Marvel Films Animation's Spider-Man, which had nonstop, hurriedly delivered, Speed Racer-ish dialogue--to the original score music. Unlike past superhero cartoons, B:TAS didn't recycle the same four or five score cues or repurpose creaky old library music. Shirley Walker and her team of B:TAS composers, which included Lolita Ritmanis and Michael McCuistion, composed an original score for every ep and used a full orchestra at a time when most other animated action shows relied on chintzy-sounding, cost-saving synthesizer music.

Danny Elfman's B:TAS main title theme, a reworking of his own brooding and dashing-sounding main theme from the Batman movies, set the tone for the show's "dark swashbuckler" sound. Walker, who conducted Elfman's 1989 Batman score and worked for him as an orchestrator, wrote a new eight-note theme for the Batman character that sounds equally thrilling and kickass. It eventually supplanted Elfman's theme in the opening titles when Warner Bros. Animation made B:TAS into a feature film (Batman: Mask of the Phantasm) and then brought the show back to the airwaves under a new title, The Adventures of Batman & Robin.

Walker and her composers crafted a different motif for each villain. Mr. Freeze was accompanied by a mournful waltz (which can be heard during the 14-minute "Gotham City Overture," track 1 on the first disc), Two-Face was represented by an eerie soprano recorder melody ("Harvey's Nightmare/Dent's Soap Box" and "Bruce Wayne's Nightmare/Two-Face Remembers"), and the Penguin received a lumbering brass theme to match his bluster ("Birds of a Feather").

The Joker is such a beloved adversary that Walker gave him not just one but two motifs, a carnival-style melody and a secondary "Fanfare for Rocky"-style crime spree theme that was used only during the "Last Laugh" ep. The liner notes refer to the Joker's "Last Laugh" crime spree theme as "a hip-hop jazz theme," but it doesn't really sound like hip-hop. It's a middle-aged white person's idea of what they think a hip-hop beat sounds like. As an FSM Board poster says, it's more rock/funk than hip-hop. Still, Walker's "Last Laugh" theme is a lot of fun, and like all the other cues, I'm jazzed to finally have it on disc.

The final track on the La-La Land album is a fitting tribute to Walker, in which she gets to finally speak, via an archival recording of her explaining her eight-note Batman theme and playing it in different variations on the piano. The subtle differences between each variation--like when Walker alternates between a somberly played second half of the theme and a more uplifting second half--are incredible. They show how much care was put into the music and the show itself.

Monday, December 15, 2008

Because this is episode WEB99, the show will consist of selections from scores to the most noteworthy and inventive films of the year 1999, including Office Space, Election, Fight Club and a film I like a little less than the other three but Laurence Fishburne was such a badass in it: The Matrix. John Frizzell's score for Office Space was never released, so Office Space will be represented here by Canibus and Biz Markie's closing credits shout-out to Johnny Paycheck, "Shove This Jay-Oh-Bee."

"Spirit of '99" begins streaming tonight at midnight and repeats tomorrow and Thursday at 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm, Wednesday at midnight, and Saturday and Sunday at 7am, 9am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm.

I've decided to end A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series after producing and hosting 100 episodes for the AFOS channel since January 2003.

Yep, I'm cancelling my own show rather than letting the bastards who run... Oh, wait a minute, I'm the bastard who runs the channel. All by myself. Never mind.

This doesn't mean I'm going away for good. It just means I'll no longer be doing shows under the AFOS: The Series title and format. My voice will still be heard on the channel and I'll continue to be "announcing song titles and making cracks, even if [it] is pre-recorded!," as one listener said to me about my voice in an e-mail a few years ago. (I'll still stream the earlier eps too. Ep WEB63, which is called "Feel the City Breakin'," is the earliest ep that doesn't make me cringe when I play it back.)

The time has come to switch to a new format for my on-air self, like the less constricting and more new releases-oriented "AFOS A-Go-Go" format I experimented with in September and November. I should have given the program a name change a long time ago. Having both the program and the channel share the same A Fistful of Soundtracks name confuses listeners who appear to be under the assumption that AFOS is a 24-hour program as opposed to a 24-hour channel. (I originally conceived AFOS as an audio archive of continuously looped episodes from my program's terrestrial radio years. But I found myself going in another direction, and that was to diversify the programming--without veering too far off from the channel's film/TV music format--and make AFOS sound more like an actual radio station, hence my interspersing of themed blocks like "The F Zone" and "Soda and Pie" with newly recorded eps of AFOS: The Series.)

In each AFOS ep, all the film or TV score tracks are connected by a certain theme, like most recently, Batman villains or monster movies. I've gotten tired of doing that one-theme-per-ep format. Writing the copy for each of these themed eps takes me forever to do. I often get hit with writer's block. Writing copy for a show in which the tracks don't have a unifying theme--like during "A-Go-Go"--is much easier for me.

Plus I'm not a creature of habit. I get bored with routine after awhile. I became bored with my last job after a couple of years (but I stayed with it for a few more years because the money was good). As for my job before that one, I got bored with it after about half a year (plus having to type your newspaper articles inside an office building that lacks air conditioning kind of puts a damper on your morale).

In the case of AFOS: The Series, which was a way for me to continue doing the same program I used to do on terrestrial radio in the late '90s and early '00s, you could tell when my interest in it started to taper off--when the program went from weekly to monthly to bimonthly to whenever-the-hell-I-feel-like-it-ly.

I've lately been listening to the kickass Scion Radio channels programmed by L.A.'s Root Down club and KCRW's Garth Trinidad. For his channel, GT records about two and a half hours of content and then has them looped over and over again for the entire month.

I'm thinking of switching to a format like the Root Down crew's or GT's, except instead of recording new segments once every month like they do, I'll do it probably every other week or whenever I can find time to get on the mic or whenever I have any space left on my hard drive. Morning Becomes Dyspeptic and the DJ-less "Assorted Fistful," "Soda and Pie," "Chai Noon" and "F Zone" blocks will remain on the AFOS schedule so that listeners won't have to hear so much of my annoying voice (listeners have told me they don't mind my voice, like the person in that aforementioned e-mail, who said, "I've *gasp* ventured into other soundtrack stations. They aren't as fun to listen to as Fistful though... There's something nice about having someone announcing song titles...").

Here's what coming up on AFOS: The Series: Ep WEB99 will flash back to the year 1999 and stream selections from scores to the most memorable films that were released during that standout year for cinema. And then like 100 Bullets, I'm ending it at 100. The final ep under the AFOS: The Series title and format will be a doozy: all 22 official Bond opening title themes in chronological order.

If you frequently listen to the channel, thanks for choosing AFOS.

Oh yeah, and change your links from jim.aquino.com to www.live365.com/stations/sookie_sook or afistfulofsoundtracks.blogspot.com. jim.aquino.com is as dead as Lindsay Lohan's movie career.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

I got a kick out of this meme in which I got to be the music supervisor for the movie about my own life ("If your life were a movie, what would the soundtrack be?").

1. Open your music library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc).2. Put it on shuffle.3. Press play.4. For every question, type the song that's playing.5. When you go to a new question, press the next button.6. Don't lie and try to pretend you're cool.

Hear the Slap Shot theme "Right Back Where We Started From" and "Don Quichotte" (a memorable part of the Northern Exposure episode "Jules et Joel") during the "F Zone" block, which airs Mondays at 4am, 9am and 3pm, Wednesdays at noon and Fridays at 5am, 9am and 3pm on A Fistful of Soundtracks. "The F Zone" streams kickass existing songs that have been used in films and shows.

"Crockett's Theme" and "Love on a Real Train (Risky Business)" can be heard during both the "Assorted Fistful" block and the "Soda and Pie" '80s block, which airs Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at noon on AFOS.

The box sets' street date is March 24. Why do I have to wait so damn long until I can finally delete last season's Venture Bros. episodes from my DVR?

Arriving at retail as a two-disc box set on both platforms for the suggested retail prices of $29.98 and $44.98, respectively, The Venture Bros. Season 3 features all 13 uncensored episodes from the show's highly popular third season and bonus material including deleted scenes and commentary. Additionally, the Blu-ray disc box set will be packaged with an exclusive CD which includes 20 tracks that comprise the full musical score from the television series' third season.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

These overly fake-sounding names for imaginary personas always end up being used either by bands (there's a British metal band that's actually called Cletus Van Damme) or message board posters (on the Film Score Monthly boards, I post under a fake name from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). They're all easier to pronounce than Blagojevich, a name that must be giving late night talk show hosts anxiety attacks.

1. Fuzzy Dunlop
Herc's fake CI on The Wire. Sometimes The Wire is funnier than most sitcoms.

2. Shecky Shabazz
A stage name the Fresh Prince creates at the last minute for his wack stand-up act.

3. Rafael De La Ghetto
A legendary street poet made up by the Fresh Prince to impress the shawties, with some help from Geoffrey the butler: "Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them, cannon in front of them, volley'd and thunder'd!"

4. Cletus Van Damme
One of The Shield's few running gags: an alias only Shane would come up with.

5. Santos L. Halper
The credit card account name Bart Simpson winds up with after he applies for a card as Santa's Little Helper.

Friday, December 5, 2008

Well, my mom and some of my relatives are clingy. Not me. I'm a Pinoy who craves his me time. So I guess that makes me more like Manny Pacquiao's trainer, Freddie Roach, who said the above funny quote about Pac-Man's huge entourage in De La Hoya/Pacquiao 24/7.

The four-episode HBO series about the advent of De La Hoya/Pacquiao Fight Night is my current favorite docu-show. Maybe it's because I'm Filipino, but seeing Filipinos get this much non-Basco brother airtime on American TV is awesome, despite the overabundance of footage of the poorest Filipino areas, as the PinoyLife blog has noted with snarkiness ("Please... film some Pinoys in Manila that are near some offices, universities, and malls"). (During the weight challenge sequence with Pacquiao's entourage, I loved how I could overhear an entourage member saying, "Excited ko!" That's a line I don't hear everyday on HBO. The only Tagalog that's uttered on HBO is during Return of the Jedi, for Christ's sake.)

There's some terrific documentary filmmaking on display in De La Hoya/Pacquiao 24/7 too. The sequence about Pacquiao's Catholic upbringing and his charity work was masterfully shot and edited. The cutaway from Pacquiao's mother to the People's Champ finishing his prayer in the gym was beautifully done. I haven't enjoyed a boxing doc this much since When We Were Kings.

A Slate.com reviewer wrote that De La Hoya/Mayweather 24/7 lacked "what When We Were Kings had in spades: historical importance to match the spectacle... the stakes of the fight are much lower than the promotional bluster would lead you to believe."

But the stakes are incredibly high with this fight, for both the 35-year-old, over-the-hill De La Hoya and his younger, shorter and faster opponent, whom I'm rooting for and whose triumphs in the ring have uplifted "an entire anguished nation," to borrow Geologic's words from his review of the docu-show. If Pac-Man wins this fight, it will uplift us even more. Filipinos everywhere will not show up for work on Monday. If you run a hospital, you can forget about those bedpans being emptied on Monday because your nurses will be out celebrating.

* Funniest line from the PinoyLife recap: "Buboy, Buboy, Buboy. You have the wackest name in the history of Filipino athletics. I'm sure that Manny appreciates all you do being his confidant, his friend, and cornerman. To most of the Filipino Americans reading this site, you're kinda like Too Big MC with Manny being MC Hammer."

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Below are my sketches for a header I designed for the Minority Militant, a Laotian American blogger and activist from Chi-Town whose posts I've enjoyed reading. He riffs on Asian American-related topics ranging from the ugly racism that's often on display on reality TV to President-Elect Obama's Asian staffers.

Props to TMM for giving me my first job--even though it was a small one--after I lost my regular job earlier this year. TMM has been digging my black-and-white webcomic, The Palace, which I created to keep myself busy (I've been posting the comic here on A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog), so he asked me to draw a new header for his blog.

The sketch of the Asian brother in the hoodie emblazoned with "TMM" is the final version of the image on the header, which can be seen on TMM's blog in all its fully inked, cleaned-up and Paint Shop Pro-and-Photoshop-enhanced glory.

Friday, November 28, 2008

About a year ago on this blog, I said, "I've become involved in a very exciting project for 2008 that I don't want to really go into detail about on this blog until the time is right to go into detail about it."

Now that the project is near completion, I can disclose what it is.

It's J.J. Abrams' Star Trek. I was Zoe Saldana's bra fitter. My first day on the job, I had a drooling problem I eventually learned to overcome.

Secret Identities' complete star-studded lineup of writers and artists is listed here. The graphic novel is set to hit stores this spring.

It's the illest idea for a graphic novel: an anthology of stories about Asian American superheroes, ranging from humorous tales to more serious ones with connections to Asian American historical events. Can you name one single current Asian American comic book superhero? Well, there's the Atom, Amadeus Cho, Nico from Runaways and Jubilee from the X-Men (does she still appear in the X-titles?)--and that's about all I know. Secret Identities will change that by introducing dozens of new Asian American heroes.

When I first heard about this unprecedented project, I was determined to become a part of it. I pitched three story ideas to the Secret Identities editors. Two of the pitches centered on Pinoy characters, and one focused on a Korean American heroine. The editors went with the one about the Korean girl, and that's what will appear in Secret Identities, with art provided by the talented Erwin Haya.

More details about "Sampler" and Secret Identities will be posted on this blog as the anthology's street date approaches.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Every time I pass some gas (silently) after Thanksgiving dinner, I'm reminded of the 1998 TeeVee.net blog post "When Bad Actors Happen to Good Shows" by Philip Michaels, which unfortunately disappeared from TeeVee.net's archives. (The post can be seen in its entirety here. Good lookin' out, Wayback Machine.)

So I'm posting excerpts from this scathing TeeVee.net jab at both the writing during the later seasons of one of my favorite '90s shows, Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-99), and Jon Seda, who was in his element as a cast member on Taye Diggs' too-short-lived legal drama Kevin Hill (2004-05) but was a terrible, out-of-place addition to the Homicide cast.

When Bad Actors Happen To Good Shows
by Philip Michaels - March 27, 1998

It happens every Thanksgiving or Easter or Christmas. All the relatives get together at my parents' humble little cottage for a big old family dinner. My mom spends 12 hours in the kitchen. We all put on our Sunday finery. And then, once the potatoes have been mashed and the corn has been buttered and the cranberries have been lovingly removed from the can and stirred up to make them look like they were fresh, we all sit down as a family to have a civilized, pleasant meal.

And we give it our best, just like Frasier's David Hyde Pierce exhorts us to do in those "The More You Know" commercials on NBC. The fine china sparkles. The conversation is spirited. The ham is succulent. And love -- honest-to-goodness family love -- is heavy in the air.

Which is about when, towards the end of the meal, my dad lets out an eardrum-busting, picture-rattling fart.

And that's the cue for everything to go to Hell. My sister starts crying and my brother-in-law just sadly shakes his head and my mother screams at my father and then demands to know why I haven't gotten married before she hastily adds that she'll still love me even if I move to West Hollywood with a hair stylist named Brad, which is about the time that she runs from the room bawling about how nobody has any time for her.

Which is my dad's cue to fart again.

My point -- other than the fact that any psychologist out there who just read those last few paragraphs is probably thinking, "Hello, grant money!" -- is that it only takes one small mishap to take something wonderfully sublime and absent-mindedly flush it down the crapper. That's true of anything, whether we're talking about disaster-plagued family get-togethers or once-phenomenal television programs.

And that brings me to Homicide...

... Jon Seda is the fart at my Thanksgiving dinner.

Seda's Falsone embodies every tough-as-nails-cop-with-a-heart-of-gold cliche that's ever graced the boob tube, right down to his Mott Street accent and emphatic hand gestures. It's almost as if Falsone was airlifted into Homicide straight out of NYPD Blue or Brooklyn South. You expect to see Nicholas Turturro burst on to the Homicide set, demanding that Jon Seda give him his identity back...

Bad enough that the Falsone character is trite. But stack him up against the other cops on Homicide with all their quirks and complexities, and Falsone assumes all the full-bodied richness of a cardboard cutout. Braugher's Pembleton visibly wrestles with his demons and doubts every week. Secor's Bayliss has spent each of the show's six seasons struggling to find happiness that always seems to be out of reach. Even Munch's sarcastic veneer is just his way of shielding himself from the unending horror of poking over one dead body after another.

And Falsone? Well, Falsone keeps muttering about how much he loves his kid...

Bad Actors have doomed Good Shows in the past, they're laying waste to them in the present, and they will continue to wreak their havoc in the future unless America's couch potatoes stay eternally vigilant. Even now, in the seedy back offices of Hollywood, powerful producers and dissolute agents are conspiring in secret to ruin your favorite TV programs. Jamie Farr as an FBI agent on X-Files. William Shatner as a brilliant Army defense attorney on JAG. Shannen Doherty as Rachel's long-lost sister on Friends.

And do you really want to be responsible for that?

Act now. Make angry phone calls to TV producers. Write long, polemical letters to corpulent network executives. March down to their offices and give long-winded speeches until building security guards are forced to break out the pepper spray. Whatever you do, let the TV Powers That Be know you won't tolerate Bad Actors lousing up Good Shows, no matter how much Jamie Farr needs the work.

Otherwise, when my old man farts at your Thanksgiving dinner, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

One of my favorite TV shows is the Saturday morning cartoon Star Trek, which NBC first broadcast in 1973. It aired right after Hanna-Barbera's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids cartoon and followed the adventures of Captain Kirk and the crew of a "starship" called the U.S.S. Enterprise. Their mission was to explore outer space. Along the way, the crew would butt heads with evil Klingon commanders, Orion pirates and dangerous energy cloud monsters.

The captain was bad. I dug that episode when he fought that turkey from the Orion pirate ship over a shipment of medicine for a sick Mr. Spock, his pointy-eared first officer from the planet Vulcan.

The Vulcan soul brother was an even badder dude than Kirk. He could read minds and he was always calm and cool like another hero of mine, John Shaft. When Spock traveled back in time to his childhood on his homeworld, he took down a wild Vulcan tiger by pinching it in the neck, which was some sort of mystical Vulcan ass-whupping move. That was bad. With moves like that, Spock will never die!

I also dug how the ship had a black crewmember manning the switchboard. I especially liked when Lt. Uhura got to be captain for a whole story because all the men from the Enterprise were captured by an all-female planet. Black folks don't often get such high positions of power on TV like Uhura did in that Star Trek episode.

So because I'm a fan of this forgotten cartoon, I was ecstatic about Paramount Pictures' upcoming major motion picture based on Star Trek.

That is until I saw the preview for it.

The movie doesn't look quite right. It doesn't look like the Star Trek I remember.

First of all, who cares about what Kirk and Spock were like as kids? The cartoon already showed us that Spock had a hard life as a mutt on Vulcan. His mama was human, his dad was Vulcan and the other Vulcan kids wanted to beat his ass. Why do we have to be told again how Spock came up? What else do we need to know, man? Can we just cut to the chase and see what the title says they're supposed to be doing, which is exploring space?

Kirk looks too young to be captain. He looks more like a cadet. And what the hell happened to his Orange Kool-Aid-colored hair?

The new Enterprise is too fast a ship now! In the animated show, the Enterprise was never that fast! This will take some getting used to.

Why is Spock trying to pimp-slap Kirk? He never pimp-slapped anybody in the cartoon.

One thing I dig about the preview is Uhura. She looks outta sight! Uhura was the finest sister on Saturday morning TV since Valerie from Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space. Because Star Trek was a Saturday morning cartoon, I never got to see her in a bra. Now I finally get to. Right on!

Another thing I like is the brief footage of starships at war. The cartoon was never that intense and it never had so many things blow up. Man, I never saw so many ships attack each other like that!

There's not a lot of face-to-face dialogue in the preview. In the cartoon, everyone talked to each other all the time and did it real close to the camera. Real close. And only their eyes and mouths moved.

Where's the orange skinny dude with three arms? Where's the alien cat lady? Where are those forcefield belts that the Enterprise crew wore whenever they walked out into space? It's not Star Trek without them.

Often, a preview isn't really helpful in telling you if the flick is any good or not (that Superfly T.N.T. preview didn't prepare me for how much of a letdown that movie was), so I guess I'll reserve judgment until I see the entire Star Trek movie, which comes out this May. I hope it lives up to the cartoon.

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Sonny Gautier is a new Fistful of Soundtracks listener from Bed-Stuy and he offered to review the newStar Trektrailer for my blog. Due to brain damage caused by exposure to too many Sid and Marty Krofft shows, a then-adolescent Sonny lapsed into a coma in 1974 and didn't wake up until last month, which means he missed the 10 Star Trek feature films and four Trek live-action spinoff shows that followed the cartoon. Because Sonny's only taste of Trek was the Saturday morning version before he slipped into his coma, he didn't know Trek originated as a live-action show until I pointed it out to him via e-mail a couple of hours ago. Because he doesn't want to be laughed at for his mistakes, Sonny has demanded that I remove his post. Yeah right, like I'm gonna remove it. This shit's too funny.

About me

I run a Tumblr called Accidental Star Trek Cosplay, and my writing has appeared on Word Is Bond (byline: DJ AFOS) and Splitsider. In 2007, I came up with the premise for "Sampler," a short story in 2009's Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (no relation to Image's Secret Identities).

This monthly blog began as a tie-in to AFOS (A Fistful of Soundtracks), an Internet radio station I ran from 2002 to 2016 (I archived some station content over at Mixcloud). The blog evolved from being a blog about both score music and radio to being a space where I discuss films, TV or any kind of music, without ever doing any stupid listicles, because this blog has been, since 2015, a listicle-free zone. People, stop writing like you're auditioning for BuzzFeed.

AFOS also stands for All Frequencies Open, Sir! and Asians Fucking Owning Shit.